One of the big healthcare trends in the United States and worldwide is standardization of imaging procedures. There is also a trend towards integration of smaller healthcare practices into larger organizations which increases the demand for standardization. In turn, the implementation of standards becomes a bigger and bigger logistical challenge because the imaging devices may be geographically separated by hundreds of miles. One of the key challenges is to ensure that imaging data for a specific diagnostic question is acquired with the same imaging configuration (e.g., imaging parameters or protocols) throughout the whole hospital network. This is important, because the scanner configuration determines contrast and image quality, greatly influencing the ability to diagnose diseases reliably. Institutions are more and more asked to account for the quality of their service and reimbursements are increasingly linked to the diagnostic performance. Thus, maintaining the same image quality and contrast for a given diagnostic question is crucial to keep or even grow revenue from the examinations.
On the other hand, the imaging systems allow operators to freely select scanner configurations. In large hospitals and imaging networks, it cannot be guaranteed that all operators have the same level of experience and can accidentally change the scanner configuration to the worse and store those parameters. Subsequent scans will then all be done with these suboptimal settings. This may remain unnoticed for quite some time and correcting it requires a person to physically modify the imaging device and store the correct parameters. This is time-consuming, error-prone and will only be possible when the device is not otherwise being used (i.e., when no patients are being examined). Thus it interferes with the clinical workflow or requires the installation after hours.